What is Experience?
What is experience?
Experience refers to the nature of the
events someone or something has
undergone. Experience is what is
happening to us all the time - as we long
we exist.
Experience, used in the present tense,
refers to the subjective nature of one's
current existence. Humans have a
myriad of expressions, behaviors,
language, emotions, etc. that
characterize and convey our moment-to-
moment experiences.
Experience, used in the past tense,
refers to the accumulated product (or
residue) of past experiences e.g., after
many hours of training and practice
building furniture out of wood, we now
consider him to be an experienced wood
craftsman.
These two emphases of the
word experience (present and past)
emerge from a critical connection and
philosophical issue:
To what extent do one's
past experiences influence
one's current and future
experience?
The idea that past experiences influence
future experiences was termed continuity
by John Dewey. All experiences, argued
Dewey, impact on one's future, for better
or worse. Basically, cumulative
experience either shuts one down or
opens up one's access to possible future
experiences.
Recommended reading:
Quotes about experience
Experience is not what happens to a
man; it is what a man does with what
happens to him.
- Aldous Huxley, Texts & Pretexts: Introduction
We go through life expecting to be tasted
while we are being swallowed.
- Elizabeth Bebesco, Haven: 'Aphorisms'
If you want knowledge, you must take
part in the practice of changing
reality. If you want to know the taste of
a pear, you must change the pear by
eating it yourself.
- Mao Zedong, On Practice, July, 1937
Life should serve up its experiences in a
series of courses.
- William Golding, Close Quarters, 17
Experience isn't interesting till it begins
to repeat itself - in fact, till it does that,
it hardly is experience.
- Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart, Pt 1, Ch 1
To most men, experience is like the stern
light of a ship, which illumines only the
track it has passed.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk, p. 434
Not all need experience, but all need the
fruit of experience.
- Bishop Mandell Creighton, Life and Letters, Vol. 2
There are two things that experiences
teach us: the first is that we should
correct heavily; the second, that is
should not be too heavily.
- Eugene Delacroix, Journal,8 March, 1860
To a great experience one thing is
essential, an experiencing nature.
- Walter Bagehot, Estimates of Some Englishmen and
Scotsmen: 'Shakespeare - the Individual'
 Experience only serves us to give others
 Experience (Vaneecia Lark) useless advice.
- Comtesse Diana, Maxims of Life, p. 75

Experience dulls the edge of all our

dogmas.
- Gilbert Murray (attrib.)